The preparation of food usually follows a recipe towards a tasty dish. While such a recipe is usually just a guideline for the person cooking a meal for themselves or family, it was sometimes raised to the status of a chemical formula in Taylorist modernism, leading to repeatable dishes branded as trademarks of food franchises. (Preble, 1993) However, taste changes; today’s consumer is more interested in options and customisable orders. This is underlined by a survey published in the Wall Street Journal, whereas only one in five millennials ever tasted a Big Mac®.(Jargon, 2016) The former flagship burger seems to get less important under ever changing seasonal features and a wider menu then in Taylorist times. The desire for customisability in the food industry can be seen from Coca Cola’s printing names on Coke cans, to ordering your custom cereals at mymuesly.com, or simply personalising your burger at the food delivery service of your choice. This paper tries to follow this trend to an extreme, proposing a computer game-like approach to collaboratively topping up a pizza1 in virtual reality (VR) and preparing it using an augmented reality (AR) guiding mechanism

Drude, Jan Philipp

Sardenberg, Victor

English

Institutionelles Repositorium der Leibniz Universität Hannover

Figure 3. Pizza designed in Project Disco with shopping list © Drude & Sardenberg, 2020.CREATIVE FOOD CYCLESPIZZA TOPPINGS – MULTIPLAYER APPROACH TO PREPARING A PIZZA IN VIRTUAL REALITY Jan Philipp DrudeVictor SardenbergThe preparation of food usually follows a recipe towards a tasty dish. While such a recipe is usually just a guideline for the person cooking a meal for themselves or family, it was sometimes raised to the status of a chemical formula in Taylorist modernism, leading to repeatable dishes branded as trademarks of food franchis-es. (Preble, 1993) However, taste changes; today’s consumer is more interested in options and customisable orders. This is underlined by a survey published in the Wall Street Journal, whereas only one in five millennials ever tasted a Big Mac®.(Jargon, 2016) The former flagship burger seems to get less important under ever changing seasonal features and a wider menu then in Taylorist times. The desire for customisability in the food in-dustry can be seen from Coca Cola’s printing names on Coke cans, to ordering your custom cereals at mymuesly.com, or simply personalising your burger at the food delivery service of your choice. This paper tries to follow this trend to an extreme, proposing a computer game-like approach to collaboratively topping up a pizza1 in virtual reality (VR) and preparing it using an augmented reality (AR) guiding mech-anism.virtual reality / augmented reality / pizza / food ordering / discrete375SESSION 3Figure 1. Catalogue of toppings and dough © Drude & Sardenberg, 2020.THE RECIPEFollowing a recipe is usually the means, by which all of the ingredients are mea-sured, processed and either cooked or baked towards a finished dish. It is often used as a simile to explain the workflow of a planning process to laymen. In an architectural context, the recipe stands in for the project drawings, relaying the construction process to the workers on site. The workers gather all the ingredi-ents at the appropriate time and assemble them, following the instructions on the drawings, towards a finished building. This puts the recipe in the preparation part of Food Cycles: the construction phase in a building’s life cycle.This concept of relating a recipe to the erection of a building, of course, oversim-plifies the processes on a modern construction site. On the other hand, it also mis-represents the reality of most cooking. A recipe is usually but a rough description of the dish, often relying on quantities like “a pinch” or the average size of an egg. The distinguished chef takes pride in relating the rough descriptions of quantities and time, given in a recipe, into a tasty dish. The similarities with the construction process work better when we consider oral or textual transmission of architectural ideas in the middle ages, which would need a master builder to translate them into a finished building. This makes cooking an artisanal form of making, while con-376CREATIVE FOOD CYCLESFigure 2. Player view in Project DisCo © Drude & Sardenberg, 2020.struction today follows an industrial mode of manufacturing. (Carpo, 2011)The belief in Taylorism forms of manufacturing in the first half of the 20th century, led to a design language of the industrial economies. The highest praise any prod-uct could claim, was to be exactly like every other from the same run. This credo of modernism soon became applicable for food and beverages also, started by the Seagram’s companies claim “Say Seagram’s and Be Sure” for their whisky to have a permanent level of quality —a nice change after the experiences of moonshine whisky in the years of the prohibition. The connection to architecture is made clear when considering, that Seagram’s was the client for one of modernisms most icon-ic projects —the Seagram’s building by Mies van der Rohe. (Carpo, 2011) The process of taste branding as well as the appearance of a food product to such a high stan-dard of recognisability, also enabled the rise of the modern fast food chain, has made obvious in the 1974 advertisement for the Big Mac®, listing all the ingredients of said burger: "Two all-beef patties, Special Sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, on-ions, on a sesame seed bun." (Clifford, 2008)Recent developments in industry and marketing have been leading away from Taylorism. Consumers nowadays are more interested in distinguishable products, personalised to their needs if possible. In food consumption this has led to cus-377SESSION 3tomisable dishes, being integrated in the drop-down lists of today’s food delivery apps, such as Lieferando, Grubhub, UberEats. (Samsudin et al., 2011) This paper further follows these lines in giving a gaming approach to the collaborative design and production of pizza in mixed reality.DIGITAL DESIGN APPROACH TO TOPPING UP A PIZZAPizza is already one of the most customisable dishes imaginable. Its modular lay-out with the dough, tomato sauce and cheese as a given, invites to topping it up with all kinds of different ingredients. Especially in online ordering, this is taken to an extreme, sometimes reinterpreting the dish, to include regional ingredients, far departing from Neapolitan origins. While customers can order any variation of toppings on their pizza, they usually don’t have any influence on their distribution. Who wouldn’t want to have their pizza “quattro stagioni” customized with their own seasons? One quarter mushrooms, onions and asparagus, one quarter zucchini, carrots and basil, one quarter spinach, ham, mushrooms and pepperoni and just to indulge in some perversion one quarter anchovies, pineapple and corn. Figure 5. Pizza design (no basil) – topped-up pizza – baked pizza © Drude & Sardenberg, 2020.378CREATIVE FOOD CYCLESA more practical aspect is the consideration of dietary requirements of a user: an online profile could contain information like vegetarianism, veganism, religious food limitations or ingredients that are not to the user’s taste. While these can get overlooked easily in a restaurant, between ordering and the chef preparing the dish, AR controlled preparation of food could make certain that undesired ingredi-ents are shunned. To try and imagine a way of designing a fully customised pizza, we take the existing platform of Project DisCo and build a layer of pizza topping on top of it, enabling users to collaboratively design a pizza in VR. This scenario is applicable to the online ordering market, where more customisability is a compet-itive advantage. Customers get the ability to design their pizza and order it to the specifications of their 3d-model. The model is streamed over the internet to the restaurant, offering the service and given to the chef, who uses it as a reference to top up the pizza. This leaves the customers with exactly the dish they wished for. In addition, a robotic process of topping up is imaginable, streamlining the whole process of pizza baking into a digital fabrication workflow, like tested at ETH Zurich for cake design. (Liu et al., 2017)Figure 4. Topping up with AR overlay © Drude & Sardenberg, 2020.379SESSION 3LET’S PLAYProject DisCo2 is a tool for intuitively assembling modular structures in VR in a bottom-up approach. Modular building blocks for the assembly can be designed in Rhino/Grasshopper and ported to Project DisCo, where users are prompted with a cloud of said blocks hovering about. They can then be agitated using a manner of choreographed interaction. The blocks snap together when brought in proximity with an aggregating structure.(Drude et al., 2020)For the purpose of topping up a pizza, we disappropriate Project DisCo into having a catalogue of 18 pizza toppings as building blocks and an empty pizza as the start-ing point for the aggregation. (Fig. 1) The users then proceed to topping up their pizza in an environment scaled to approximately 20:1, were the pizza becomes the floor while users are immersed within the hovering toppings. (Fig. 2) Several filters are accessible to the users, whereby they can decide to only top up certain parts of the pizza or only use certain ingredients. The toppings are set in motion by movements of the VR-controllers, which affect the direction and veloc-ity of the hovering parts proportionally to their movements. The users can thus top up the pizza in a process moderated by game physics, leaving the user as the choreographer of the toppings without placing every piece by hand. The result can then be exported back to Grasshopper, which acts as an intermediate platform to bring the model into CAD to be used as a reference for the actual topping up of the physical pizza. (Fig. 3)To transform the digital model into a dish, we propose an AR approach. For this purpose, we use the Grasshopper plugin fologram3 (Jahn et al., 2018) to overlay the dough with the digital model of our pizza, successively prompting us with the right places to put the toppings. (Fig. 4) This utilizes a well-tested form of assembly, where the user’s senses are augmented by the device, enabling the placement of parts at pre-planned positions and rotations within the tolerances of the device and human limits of precision. The order wherein the toppings are placed follows an algorithm, that groups the ingredients according to type and successively lets the users place them considering overlapping. Finally, the pizza goes into the oven to be baked at the users’ discretion and eaten in due course. (Fig. 5)380CREATIVE FOOD CYCLESFINAL THOUGHTSThe paper takes a contemporary approach to design and fabrication in archi-tecture, using a discrete design system and assembly in AR. Such an approach to digital design and fabrication is currently practised in several universities and employed in a few architectural firms. An example would be the project IBrick cre-ated at UCL Bartlett’s BPro Research Cluster9 in 2018, where students created a furniture system out of discrete parts to be assembled with AR assistance. (Cher-ry, 2018) The work shown in this paper disappropriates this approach of discrete design and AR-fabrication to the realm of food preparation, placing it at the inter-section between computation and food design. While it showcases a workable solution for made-to-measure dishes, it wants to be understood as a hyperbole. Using a game-like approach to ordering a pizza, is an overly complicated method to receiving a meal and is but a speculative continua-tion of today’s means of ordering. The restaurants with the widest variety of offers and the most sophisticated mechanisms for customisation are usually big chains, which get a lot of return on the investment in a refined system, by using it in a large number of retailers For the customer looking for a tasty pizza these large chains usually don’t offer the best product, which is why it is the authors’ appeal to the reader to skip overly complicated methods of customisation and trust their chef. Bon appetit.FOOTNOTES1 The computer games from the pizza connection series offer the player the ability to design their own pizza to be sold in their virtual restaurants. The design is mostly 2D and does not offer the ability to export the layout of ingredients. See: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5881602 Project DisCo is an application to integrate bottom-up aggregation of modular building blocks and intuitive spatial design into Virtual Reality (VR). It allows the designer to choreograph large amounts of building blocks interactively through physics simulations as a means of form generation. It is developed by Jan Philipp Drude. See: https://www.project-disco.com3 Fologram is an AR interface build on top of Rhino and Grasshopper. It allows users to stream 3D-models to their AR devices, like the Microsoft HoloLens or Smartphones and interact with them through grasshopper scripts. See: https://fologram.com/381SESSION 3BIBLIOGRAPHYCarpo, M. (2011) The alphabet and the algorithm. Writing architecture. Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press.Cherry, L. (2018) Bartlett B-Pro Show 2018. London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. pp. 90-95.Clifford, S. (2008) Remember ‘2 All-Beef Patties?’ McDonald’s Hopes You Do. The New York Times. 17 July. Available on line at: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/business/media/17adco.html [Accessed: 10 August 2020].Drude, J.P., Rossi, A. & Becker, M. (2020) Project DisCo: Choreographing Discrete Building Blocks in Virtual Reality. In: Christoph Gengnagel, Olivier Baverel, Jane Burry, Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen, et al. (eds.). Impact: Design With All Senses. 2020 Cham, Springer International Publishing. pp. 288–99.Jahn, G., Newnham, C., van den Berg, N. & Beanland, M. (2018) Making in Mixed Reality – Holographic design, fabrication, assembly and analysis of woven steel structures. In: Phillip Anzalone, Marcella del Signore, & Andrew John Wit (eds.). Recalibration: On Imprecision and Infidelity. 2018 Mexico City, ACADIA PUB CO. pp. 88–97.Jargon, J. (2016) McDonald’s Knows It’s Losing the Burger Battle – Can It Come Back? Wall Street Journal. 7 October. Available on line at: https://www.wsj.com/articles/mcdonalds-knows-its-losing-the-burger-battlecan-it-come-back-1475769684 [Accessed: 7 August 2020].Liu, Z., Zhang, M., Bhandari, B. & Wang, Y. (2017) 3D printing: Printing precision and application in food sector. Trends in Food Science & Technology. 69, 83–94. Preble, J.F. (1993) Global Expansion: The Case of U.S. Fast-Food Franchisors. Journal of Global Marketing. 6 (1–2), pp. 185–206.Samsudin, N.A., Ahmad Khalid, S.K., Mohd Kohar, M.F.A., Senin, Z., et al. (2011) A customizable wireless food ordering system with realtime customer feedback. In: 2011 IEEE Symposium on Wireless Tech-nology and Applications (ISWTA). September 2011 Langkawi, Malaysia, IEEE. pp. 186–191. 382

Pizza Toppings - Multiplayer Approach to Preparing a Pizza in Virtual Reality

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Pizza Toppings - Multiplayer Approach to Preparing a Pizza in Virtual Reality

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